Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power of Fashion

by Tanisha C. Ford Narrated by Tanisha C. Ford

Overview

This program is read by the author.

Essence's 10 BOOKS WE'RE DYING TO TOSS INTO OUR SUMMER TOTES | The Philadelphia Inquirer's BIG SUMMER BOOKS FOR 2019 | 6 BOOKS THAT COMPLICATE THE IDEA OF INDEPENDENCE by Colorlines | Bitch Media's 15 NONFICTION BOOKS FEMINISTS SHOULD READ THIS SPRING

"Everyone from the shopaholic to the clearance rack queen will see themselves in [Ford's] pages." -Essence

"Takes you not only into the closet, but the inner sanctum of an ordinary extraordinary Black girl who discovered herself through clothes." -Michaela Angela Davis, Image Activist and Writer


From sneakers to leather jackets, a bold, witty, and deeply personal dive into Black America's closet In this highly engaging book, fashionista and pop culture expert Tanisha C. Ford investigates Afros and dashikis, go-go boots and hotpants of the sixties, hip hop's baggy jeans and bamboo earrings, and the #BlackLivesMatter-inspired hoodies of today.

The history of these garments is deeply intertwined with Ford's story as a black girl coming of age in a Midwestern rust belt city. She experimented with the Jheri curl; discovered how wearing the wrong color tennis shoes at the roller rink during the drug and gang wars of the 1980s could get you beaten; and rocked oversized, brightly colored jeans and Timberlands at an elite boarding school where the white upper crust wore conservative wool shift dresses.

Dressed in Dreams is a story of desire, access, conformity, and black innovation that explains things like the importance of knockoff culture; the role of “ghetto fabulous” full-length furs and colorful leather in the 1990s; how black girls make magic out of a dollar store t-shirt, rhinestones, and airbrushed paint; and black parents' emphasis on dressing nice. Ford talks about the pain of seeing black style appropriated by the mainstream fashion industry and fashion's power, especially in middle America. In this richly evocative narrative, she shares her lifelong fashion revolution-from figuring out her own personal style to discovering what makes Midwestern fashion a real thing too.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

Africana studies professor and cultural critic Tanisha Ford’s voice is well paced and informative but never overly academic as she narrates her life story, focusing on the theme of fashion. Her narrative encapsulates the impact of social change on clothing trends. Ford clearly expresses her desire to belong, her longing for her mother’s confidence and fashion sense, and her quest for “good hair.” A chapter on bamboo earrings covers cultural appropriation and segues beautifully to hair and makeup as an extension of self-expression. Ford’s voice is vibrant but packs the most punch with her quiet delivery of complicated topics such as the symbolism of the hoodie. She also captures the intensity of a Black Lives Matter protest when she imitates crowd chants and the bullhorn voice of the police. A.L.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

05/27/2019

Ford, a professor of history and Africana Studies, follows up 2015’s Liberated Threads with this thoughtful memoir in which “clothes are never just garments.” She traces her journey from industrial Fort Wayne, Ind., through boarding school on the East Coast (where she had to balance the baggy jeans she loved and the Mary Janes the preppy kids were wearing) and a year of college in Atlanta (where the lure of knee-high boots eventually surrendered to the desire to move back to Indiana, where her young son was living with her parents), to a protest of the death of Michael Brown (where hoodies, which were utilitarian for the factory workers of Fort Wayne and fashionable for their kids, became political) and a Louis Vuitton store on Fifth Avenue in New York. The dashiki runs through it all, beginning as a symbol of her parents’ individualism in the 1970s and continuing as a shorthand for their dreams for her. Ford sprinkles in the history and politics of the styles she highlights as well as a deep affection for her mother, the first style icon she knew. Her knowledge of fashion and her love for the women who influenced her style makes this appealing for anyone who’s ever loved a piece of clothing. Agent: Tanya McKinnon, McKinnon McIntyre. (June)

From the Publisher

Essence’s 10 BOOKS WE’RE DYING TO TOSS INTO OUR SUMMER TOTES | The Philadelphia Inquirer's BIG SUMMER BOOKS FOR 2019 | 6 BOOKS THAT COMPLICATE THE IDEA OF INDEPENDENCE by Colorlines | Bitch Media's 15 NONFICTION BOOKS FEMINISTS SHOULD READ THIS SPRING | ONE OF The Root's FAVORITE READS OF 2019

"For Ford, fashion isn't just about how we look—she knows that what we wear is both personal and political." —The Root

"Poignant yet funny ... Ford does a brilliant job tracing the roots of fashion and its intersection with African-American culture, music and social movements." —Diverse

"A professor and pop-culture observer finds insight behind the statement, 'clothes are never just garments'... An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from 'a proud dashiki daughter, dressed in my own dreams.'" —Kirkus Reviews

"Ford’s memoir explores the connections between Black style and Black struggle; her nostalgia for Nike
“kicks” is tempered with pain over the crack and gang era they represented (“We watched as our parents’
freedom dreams morphed into crack vapor") and anger at Nike executives who “for damn sure weren’t showing up on our doorsteps to give their condolences to so-and-so’s mama after her kid was gunned down in their shoes or beaten and robbed for them.” Ford’s ultimate fashion achievement, successfully bucking racial profiling at a Louis Vuitton store, represents “enfranchisement . . . a feeling few black folk in this country get to feel." —Booklist (starred review)

"A rich and exciting book that focuses on family love, girlhood, the black arts movement and the closet. I loved this book. I am still smiling and embracing my memories of coming of age and creating and finding multiple identities while styling in and out of my own closet. Groundbreaking." —Deborah Willis, New York University and author of Posing Beauty

“Tanisha Ford explores and explicates the intricacies and politics of black style with the rigor of a critic and the heart of a writer. Deconstructing everything from Afros, dashikis, bamboo earrings, baggy jeans, sneakers, and hoodies, she's a master at letting us see and feel how what we wear expresses our politics and our deepest desires.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of What Truth Sounds Like

"What a charming and endearing collection of memories that will inspire future fashionistas who dare to dream beyond their surroundings." —Mimi Plange, fashion designer and creative director

"In Dressed in Dreams, Tanisha Ford gets Hurston with it, fearlessly and tenderly combing through the closet of her own black girlhood to unearth a treasure trove of sartorial choices - ones that reveal the innovative, rich and delicious complexity of black female identity. Dressed in Dreams proves that when it comes to black women 'we are what we wear' is much more than a threadbare adage. In Ford’s capable hands, it’s elevated to homage.” —Joan Morgan, cultural critic and author of She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

"There is no one more deft at weaving the fabric of our collective story together with our fashion choices and the politics that shape them than Tanisha Ford. This book will make you reminisce, reconnect and reflect anew on the fashion of the nineties, but with a Midwestern girls twist. Like your favorite album, you will want to take this journey from beginning to end." —Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage

"I love this book. It's a very funny and rare take on Black American style, and it's a Black girl's coming of age story that isn't tragic." —Akiba Solomon, co-author of How We Fight White Supremacy

“Surprisingly blunt yet lingeringly nuanced, Dressed in Dreams is a socioeconomic exploration of race, class and gender, dressed up as simple, personal coming-of-age stories. Ultimately, it’s not about the clothes.” —Aja Raden, author of Stoned

"A winning look at black girl fashion." —Library Journal (starred review)

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

Africana studies professor and cultural critic Tanisha Ford’s voice is well paced and informative but never overly academic as she narrates her life story, focusing on the theme of fashion. Her narrative encapsulates the impact of social change on clothing trends. Ford clearly expresses her desire to belong, her longing for her mother’s confidence and fashion sense, and her quest for “good hair.” A chapter on bamboo earrings covers cultural appropriation and segues beautifully to hair and makeup as an extension of self-expression. Ford’s voice is vibrant but packs the most punch with her quiet delivery of complicated topics such as the symbolism of the hoodie. She also captures the intensity of a Black Lives Matter protest when she imitates crowd chants and the bullhorn voice of the police. A.L.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2019-04-28
A professor and pop-culture observer finds insight behind the statement, "clothes are never just garments."

For Ford (African Studies and History/Univ. of Delaware; Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, 2015, etc.) and her generation of black women who came of age in the 1980s and '90s, born to parents who embraced the civil rights and Black Is Beautiful movements, certain garments carried cultural import. In a narrative that progresses by discrete, chronological chapters, the author presents a kind of memoir of her life through certain iconic looks that she incorporated over the years, creating through hairstyle, clothes, and accessories a "powerful social skin." Her topics include the dashiki, baggy jeans, "coochie cutters," knee-high boots ("according to the churchgoing adults in our young lives, knee-high boots were…for club-hopping women, street walkers, strippers, and drug dealers' girlfriends"), bamboo earrings, the afro puff, and the hoodie. Each of these, she asserts, was a black innovation that encapsulated "rich, textured stories of our lives." The dashiki was adopted by black militants in the late 1960s as a symbol of pan-African struggle. In a humorous section, Ford describes the Jheri curl craze of the 1980s, sported by Michael Jackson and others. "Hands down," she writes, "the Jheri curl is the most maligned hairstyle in black history" as well as "the messiest…smelliest hairstyle ever invented." As the author delineates, many of the looks were inspired by urban culture and the emergent genre of hip-hop. As Ford moved from high school to college, where she majored in English literature and African studies, she continued to experiment with her look as a reflection of her inner self. Later, "with three degrees behind my name," she championed the hoodie look as a form of protest and sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement.

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from "a proud dashiki daughter, dressed in my own dreams."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173487285
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Dashiki

We were a dashiki family in a Dickies town. And in a small Rust Belt city like Fort Wayne, Indiana, where conformity is essential for survival, this mattered. My parents were an oddball couple — one part black militant, one part bohemian dreamer — who lived full tilt in the 1970s, and forgot to hang up their dashikis at the end of the decade. Well, to be completely honest, I've never actually seen either of them don a dashiki. But I have lived with their dashiki stories — huge, mythical stories — my entire life. And I've concluded: clothes are never just garments.

Each time we stand before our closet to pick out our clothes, we make a series of choices about how we want to appear before the world. This is just as true for people who claim not to care about clothes as it is for self-proclaimed fashionistas. It's because we recognize that the way we adorn ourselves communicates something about who we are and where we come from. And everyone has experienced the discomfort of showing up somewhere dressed like they didn't get the memo. We can think of our clothes, then, as a powerful social skin.

We assume that we know what signals or markers clothes tell us about who wears them: their race, gender, sexuality, political leanings, socioeconomic status, religion, and so forth. We're not always right, but the mere fact that we think we know means that we believe that clothes reflect an established cultural value system.

So when we pick out our power suit because we need to feel confident in a new environment or our "Assata Taught Me" t-shirt because we want folks to know whose we are as soon as we walk into the room, we're aware of the social politics of dress and are finding ways to survive and thrive within social norms, or perhaps even to transgress them.

But even though the political "stakes is high" where clothes are concerned, there is room for play. Fashion allows us to turn the street into one big drag show. Through our clothes we can do our own form of world-making, imagining possibilities beyond what our current status says is our reality. And nobody does this better than people from oppressed groups, because we know what it's like to be denied access or told something isn't for us simply because of the color of our skin or who we choose to love or because we pay with food stamps.

I've devoted my entire career to unraveling the mysteries of why we make the choices we make around what we wear on our bodies and how we style our hair. It began as a way to think through how black women incorporated fashion into their activist strategies in the civil rights and Black Power movement years. Along the way, I noticed that whenever I gave talks about that moment in history, there were people of all ages who wanted to share their dressed body stories. Folks were finding joy in telling their stories and freedom in sharing their traumas in a safe space. So that got me to thinking that there was a piece of this thing that I was missing. I realized: there's power in getting dressed that goes beyond "big P" politics. There's "little p" politics — the everyday pleasures and delights of styling out, the strategies we use to navigate microaggressions, how we create communities around hair and dress, the ways we call out appropriation. Our garments are archives of memories — individual and collective, material and emotional — that tell these rich, textured stories of our lives. To make it plain: our clothes make us feel things. All the things.

I wanted to write a book that acknowledges those everyday struggles and celebrates black innovation in fashion. We are the most creative folks, knowing how to do the most with the very least, in all the best ways. I wanted to pay homage to every Big Mama and Ma'dear who made sure that even if their kids had nothing but hand-me-downs, they would be clean. I wanted to shout out the kids who had to go to school in said ill-fitting hand-me-down jeans and turned that look into the vibrant baggy jeans trend of the 1990s. I wanted to embrace the girls who survived on a steady diet of Vibe and Honey magazines and got called "ghetto" for rocking two pairs of huge doorknocker earrings, turquoise Wet n Wild lipstick, and dookie braids, only to see white girls be praised as fashion-forward when they did it. I wanted to big-up everyone who rocked a knockoff when they couldn't afford the real designer version. I wanted to give queer and trans folk in the ballroom scene their props for innovating much of what we call hip hop fashion and beauty culture, without ever getting the credit they deserved. There's a whole black fashion ecosystem that exists because of and in spite of the mainstream fashion industry, which steals as many dreams as it inspires.

I found that while I was telling everyone else's story, I had my own story to tell about coming of age in a quirky political family in a Midwestern city that most people have never even heard of. Coming face-to-face with my own stories of getting dressed has not only turned me from researcher to subject, it's made me see that black girls in the Midwest have a fashion story to tell too.

And all of my style choices and life trials and (mis)adventures can be traced back to the dashikis that I can imagine hanging in my parents' closet. My parents. The ones who taught me how to dress and dream — and how to navigate the politics therein. I am a descendant of their fly style and also of the generational traumas that have fractured our family. I have taken my parents' style, flipped it, remixed it, innovating with my own looks, traditions, and dress practices as a way to keep a grasp on my humanity. It definitely hasn't been easy being a dashiki daughter. As the heir apparent to my parents' weirdness, I have learned firsthand about the emotional and social torment that came with daring to express myself differently. But my parents' dashiki dreams would also lead me on a wondrous odyssey, far from Fort Wayne's rusty sartorial trappings to some of the most glamorous, fashion-forward cities in the world. By telling my fashion story, I'm telling the story of a community and a strategy for living, vital to our survival, shared across generations.

* * *

My dad, Herman Ford, was born into a family of Alabama sharecroppers who had fled the fields of the Jim Crow South for more lucrative livelihoods in the industrial Midwest. They were a part of the Second Great Migration, which brought a massive wave of more than 5 million African Americans from rural and urban areas of the South to settle in northern and western cities across the country after World War II. My grandmother, Ora Dee, followed her brother Ollis up to Fort Wayne in 1953. Fort Wayne — an old Revolutionary War military fort turned manufacturing epicenter that sits at the nexus of three rivers — was the second largest city in the state. No one has ever called it a black cultural mecca, but it did have a lot of jobs to offer with the Pennsylvania Railroad, General Electric, Rea Magnet Wire, Phelps Dodge, and International Harvester. My father, who made his way into the world in summer 1953, was the first of the Ford children to be born in Fort Wayne, something that made him special among his siblings. Herman was the freedom baby. He had soaked up his mother's hopes of a better life up North in the womb and come out built of potential, destined to change the family's future.

But this freedom dream would be swiftly and violently interrupted one bloody night in December 1957, when my grandfather murdered my grandmother with a fatal blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun before turning the weapon on himself. Instantly orphaned, the Ford children, now eight in number, were placed in the custody of an uncle and an older cousin who had also migrated up from Alabama.

There was always a shortage of food and clothes in their large, extended clan; any food that entered the house was quickly devoured by the children dressed in dingy hand-me-downs, who had grown accustomed to living on the edge of starvation. By the time my dad was old enough to fully understand the dire poverty and emotional minefield he and his siblings were living in in the wake of his parents' murder-suicide, he already had an extensive criminal jacket. He had started breaking into neighborhood houses to steal food, destroying property, racking up truancies. Crime after crime, Dad found himself trading in his hand-me-down clothes for the county-issued garb at the notorious Sol A. Wood Youth Center. "Sollywood," as they nicknamed it, was known for taking budding delinquents and turning them into hardened criminals by the time they were eighteen. The toughest teens in Fort Wayne — gang members, drug dealers, masterminds of the organized robbery syndicates — were the rebellious stars of Sollywood. Wood became my dad's second home. In his early teens, Dad would commit crimes intentionally — busting windows out of a neighbor's garage, relieving a schoolmate of his personal belongings — just so he could take up residence and enjoy three square meals a day and sleep in peace. He gladly gave up his civilian clothes for the drab Sollywood uniform.

After one time too many, a judge, tired of seeing Herman in his court, decided it was time to give the thirteen-year-old a real sentence: fifteen months at White's Institute. White's was a Quaker-run co-ed manual labor center for youth fifty miles from Fort Wayne, named after Quaker leader Josiah White. Far from a summer retreat, the work camp used Quaker religious teachings and principles of hard labor to "rehabilitate" young folks and give them skills applicable to life in the various factory towns from which they came. White's residents alternated between a week of school and a week of work. They were responsible for running everything on the multi-acre farm, from leading the lawn and construction crews to barbering all the inmates' hair. Dad was assigned to manage the dairy crew that milked the farm's forty cows. The institute offered my father the stability that he craved.

And it gave him his consciousness back. From the Quaker teachings, he took away a strong sense of responsibility and personal boundaries, things that had been numbed out of him in his uncle's house. And White's religious teachings also taught my father that black folks were equal to whites. This was not just a belief. This was knowledge — knowledge that was dangerous for a poor black boy. In a city like Fort Wayne, black folks were taught to know their place at the bottom of the social order. Whites, regardless of class, got the pick of the best housing, they got the most opportunities for advancement in the factories — even if they had fewer skills — and they lived in a city that catered every social activity to their interests. The Fort Wayne that black folks walked through was a different place. But at White's, there was nothing that made the white boys my dad worked alongside any better than him. He left White's knowing that he was just as capable of achieving as white folks were.

He returned to the house on Lewis Street, grown into muscled, sun-kissed, newly thoughtful young manhood, to find a striking girl holding court in front of the old house. Amye Glover was a mahogany-complexioned, rough-and-tumble type of girl; she sported an Afro and often donned dashikis and caftans in audacious faux African prints. The wilder the colors, the better. She was best friends with Herman's little sister Marlene. For months Amye had been hanging out at Marlene's crib, proselytizing to her friends (who weren't "conscious") about black cultural nationalism and liberation and women's rights, like she'd seen the Black Nationalist preachers do in her hometown of Cleveland. She also used her platform to tell tales of her own criminal escapades.

AMYE: Then that sucka turned around talking all that jive mess ...

MARLENE: What'd you do, G??!!

AMYE: Sis, I told that sucka he bet not eva put his hands on my shirt again, if he knows what's good for him!!

All this loud talk wasn't a turn-on for Herman. He'd grown attached to structure, order, and work that didn't require boasting. He wasn't down with all that brash, militant rhetoric, and he walked past without acknowledging her. And that set the pattern for the remainder of high school. Amye would come around, talkin' politics and poetry and art with Marlene, and Marlene's square brother, as Amye thought of him, would pass back and forth in the background ignoring the girls.

Though she had a streetwise, hood exterior, Amye was a daughter of the black elite, and she had been groomed to join its ranks. She was bound for college — in fact, it was nonnegotiable in her family. Her father, Seaburn Glover, came from a working-class family of Pullman porters, respectable work for a black man, despite the meager wages. He'd studied history and mathematics at Florida A&M University (FAMU), where he'd also pledged Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, after serving in the Army during World War II. Seaburn wanted to become a teacher, like his older sister, Jeannette, a FAMU alumna who became a renowned teacher in Seminole County, Florida (and happened to be close friends and Zeta Phi Beta Sorority sisters with writer Zora Neale Hurston). But the Cleveland Board of Education made it difficult for black folks to get licensure during the age of Jim Crow, so Seaburn became a manual laborer, running the stockroom for a Jewish-owned company, making good money. His wife, Bennie Lou, came from an upwardly mobile, land-owning clan in Mississippi, boasting college degrees and Greek affiliations. Bennie Lou herself was a nurse, educated at Alcorn State University, where she also joined Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. The Glovers were the epitome of black socialites: homeowners who lived in Cleveland's respectable if still not fully integrated Mount Pleasant neighborhood. They partied with other college-educated black folks who owned fancy cocktail dresses and belonged to the major black organizations of the day — the sororities, the fraternities, the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, Jack and Jill. The point is, Amye had all the black elite bona fides that a burgeoning socialite needed.

After a too-short lifetime of caring for others at the local hospital, Bennie Lou died of cancer. Amye was six, and she rebelled in the most dangerous ways. She developed a reputation as a serious brawler who would fight any boy or girl who dared talk smack. "Oh, your mama used to fight! All the time! She stayed in trouble," my aunt Marcia has told me on more than one occasion. By the time she was a teenager, Amye was skipping more days of school than she was attending and running with an older crowd of petty hustlers and thieves, kids who liked to steal beer and cigarettes and porterhouse steaks from the corner market.

Amye was always something of a stylish criminal, wearing hot pants and sleeveless sweater-vests, elaborate eye makeup, and false eyelashes. In her rebel gear, she was like a black Bonnie, of Bonnie and Clyde fame. The film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, was released in 1967, the heyday of Amye's crime spree. She was drawn to rebel narratives, and that admiration drew her not only to Hollywood outlaws but to the real-life Black Panthers and Black Cultural Nationalist street preachers who were highly active in Cleveland. She too would be an outlaw. That life was far more compelling than the frilly world of the Jack and Jill cotillion.

Though their class origins were starkly opposite, Mom, like Dad, underwent a major course correction as a teen. When she was fifteen her stepmother had had enough, and her parents signed the papers to have her sent to a group home two hundred miles away from Cleveland — in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She was crushed. The group home was run by a Chinese woman named Mrs. Lee and a staff of counselors and house parents. The house held twelve girls, most of whom were from other minor factory cities: Elkhart, Indiana; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio. Amye ended up staying there longer than was originally mandated. She was still getting into trouble in Fort Wayne, hanging out late, sneaking into Link's Wonderland — a black-owned nightclub with a skating rink and pool tables — and smoking reefer with her new street buddies. Mrs. Lee worried she was risking a path to prison, so she recommended to the judge who handed down the first group home sentence that Amye stay in her care at the home for the remaining three years of high school.

While Amye might have preferred to be back with her own family, Mrs. Lee's group home was far better than the alternative: girl's school. The group home afforded Amye a cultural experience that was far richer than what most black Fort Wayne folks knew. The house parents, typically middle-class white folks with college degrees, had a type of social access that even the elite black parents Amye grew up with didn't. They introduced Amye to horseback riding at their family stables, camping and hiking at Lake Geneva (in the heart of Indiana's Amish country), French cuisine at Café Johnell, surf and turf at the seafood restaurant downtown. Through them, she gained exposure that would change her life. And mine.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Dressed in Dreams"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Tanisha C. Ford.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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